In his Study on Afsharid Historiography, Ernest Tucker has Shown that Nadir Shah's chroniclers depicted him as the restorer of the Safavid dynasty, and appealed to notions of Safavid legitimacy in their histories. One chronicler, Muhammad Kazim Marvi, accomplished this partly by relating how Nadir Shah found a tablet (lawḥ) upon which Timur had inscribed instructions for Nadir Shah. Although Marvi was predominantly appealing to Safavid legitimacy, in the process he also linked Nadir's name with Timur. Laurence Lockhart notes a number of similarities between Nadir and Timur, indicating instances where Nadir seems to have modeled his reign on Timur's. These include (1) Nadir's naming his grandson Shahrukh, (2) Nadir's wife and Timur's daughter-in-law (wife of Shahrukh) both sharing the same name, Gawhar Shad, and (3) Nadir's use of certain Timurid military tactics.

J. R. Walsh's Comments on the nature of historiography may appear strikingly simple and obvious, yet they provided the stimulus for this paper, which compares three minor Safavid historical works and aims to show that every document can: a) supply some historical information; and b) provide us with information about the author and the intention of the work.

Published in 1933, Walther Hinz's detailed study on the short and turbulent reign of Safavid Shah Ismacil II (984-85/1576-77), which he likens to that of Ivan the Terrible, has yet to be surpassed. Although Hinz consulted many Safavid chronicles then in manuscript, including a number which have yet to be published, his discussion of a major facet of the period's history, Shah Ismacil II’s religious policies, is based primarily on the account of Iskandar Beg Munshi in Tārīkh-i cālam-ārā-yi cAbbasī, which he essentially paraphrases. Hinz concludes that Shah Ismacil II’s pro-Sunni policies, including primarily his prohibitions against cursing the Companions of the Prophet and his attempt to remove the Shicite credal statement cAlīyun walī Allāh “cAli is the ally of God” from the coinage, resulted not from political expediency but rather from personal conviction. In the end, these policies failed. Realizing that he could not win over the Qizilbash and that he himself was in grave danger, Shah Ismacil rescinded his decrees, had his pro-Sunni ṣadr and advisor, Mirza Makhdum Sharifi, placed under house arrest, and reconfirmed his commitment to Shicism before the end of his short reign.

An important event in the early modern history of india was Nadir Shah's conquest, culminating in the battle of Karnal and the sack of Delhi in the spring of 1739. During this campaign, Nadir looted a huge part of the Mughal treasury, including the fabled Peacock Throne and the Kuh-i Nur diamond, and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of citizens of Delhi in a great slaughter carried out by his army. Historians of India have viewed this invasion as a crushing blow from which the Mughal dynasty never truly recovered, paving the way for European power to become established on the subcontinent in the next few decades. It has been remembered by some Iranian historians as Nadir's crowning military achievement, after which he denied his country the benefits of his victory, wasting away the final years of his reign in an orgy of terror and blood.

Identity implies the other. As there is no self-definition without a view of the Other, the process whereby the “Self” discovers the “Other” is crucial to the formation of a self-image, for individuals as much as for groups of people claiming a collective identity. Historically, this process has never been more acute and intense than with the explosion of intercultural contact between Europe and the rest of the world following the so-called Age of Discovery. Nothing matches the radical novelty and drama of the first encounter between Europeans and the inhabitants of the New World. Though different inasmuch as it built on previous, intermittent contact and thus lacked the shock element of the utterly outlandish and bizarre, Europe's interaction with most of the major peoples of Asia in early modern times was hardly less transformative in the long run. Unprecedented in frequency and intensity, European-Asian contact as of the sixteenth century began to undermine the exotic notions and fabulous images that had formed and developed since Antiquity and that, over time, had been allowed to harden into convention.

Despite extant, though often indirect references to women in manuscript and archival sources, modern historians of Safavid Iran have paid little attention to the active role of women in the formative period of its history.